A very meta-LJ post

[chanaleh]

It finally occurred to me to have a look at the Site Map.

There I serendipitously encountered, listed under "Fun Stuff" (always a promising heading), the following bits of amusement:

• The LiveJournal Song!


• LiveJournal Dating! [Those familiar with JDate will join me in instantly pegging this feature as LJDate.]

Yowza.

Comments

Re: This has nothing to do with the subject of your post...

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Hey! How cool. Wish to God you'd found us (meaning my shul :-) before you moved away to Providence, though, 'cause it sounds like you might have really liked it. Lots of young families (and BTW I looked at your baby pix and what a doll), lots of interesting people under (as well as over) 40, a fair number of writerly types.

I don't write about Jewish things in my journal quite as often as I think about them, either, just because it's such a constant background force in my life that it hardly bears narrating ;-) But you remind me that maybe I should make more of an effort -- for that very reason.

And coincidentally, I just posted to jbcs recently with a link to my conversion FAQ essay.

Keep in touch!

Re: This has nothing to do with the subject of your post...

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

I wish we'd found out about it, too. We were happy with our shul, Temple Reyim in West Newton, mostly for the service, but it was an older crowd. The thing that kept us from searching for different shuls in Boston was really that I felt it was time to try to find a shul that we could walk to on shabbos, and we had a whole house in West Roxbury, so finding something with as much space, but closer to central Boston, was just impossibly expensive. This was part of the larger problem with Boston for us, which was that the whole driving/finding stuff to do/meeting up with people equation just never worked out. The idea of courting death by driving to shul in Brookline or Brighton for a half an hour didn't appeal to me on shabbos.

The one benefit of our Temple Beth Bingo is that I can easily walk there, but otherwise it's the same basic problem -- the Providence shul with all the vitality is on the East Side, and we couldn't afford to live within walking distance in a reasonable place. For other life issues (ease of getting around, places to go, and so on) we are doing much better here, but this is one piece of the puzzle that has not quite dropped into place.

Of course, now that we moved here, we found out the shul is planning to move at some point. As usual, all the Conservative Jews moved out of the inner suburbs and left the shul behind; even the rabbi lives a good 25 minute drive away. They need to do something -- weekend before last they had 12 people at shabbos services. On the other hand there are plenty of chances to work on improving my davening and lehning skills! :-)

So much more interesting to write in LJ than to do work...